>Opera has made their eponymous browser (v8.5) free, as in beer ( http://www.opera.com ). Used to be you suffered banner ads for free, or paid $39 for a no-ads version.

Great.

I didn't like some of the changes from version 7 to 8 - for example, it shows less details when fetching data - but found out eventually where to change the options.

And, Opera gets more compatible with every version, with the most important Web pages. I use Opera almost exclusively for a few years now - you know, "Love at the first site".

>Opera works nicely here with the UT, which is a pretty good test. Compared to FireFox 1.0.6:
>
>- Mousewheel works better when composing messages
>- Clocks next to unexpanded topics now disappear after being clicked on to "acknowledge" messages as read
>- Sounds now happen when replies or agent messages show up (work in IE, never could get them to work in FireFox)
>
>The browser loads much faster than FireFox and overall seems a little crisper in operation.
>
>The only very minor thing I don't like as much as FireFox (so far) is that the menu bar isn't as customizable. In FireFox I set it up so there are buttons to the right of the menu pads, and I can have a full-width address bar. You can't put toolbar buttons on the menu in Opera.
>
>I'll be testing over the next while on JavaScript-heavy and other intense sites to see how it works. But, so far, pretty good.